Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus!

Whew, dodged a mistake — the movie is on RIGHT NOW! An alert reader caught me in time and let me know I live in the Central Time Zone. I haven’t even touched the hooch yet.

It starts with Deborah Gibson, Submarine Pilot, dodging angry whales, and…breaking a giant octopus out of a block of ice? And it then destroys an oil drilling platform? I’m confused. That means I have to take a sip. (No, not a drink. I plan to survive this event.

A shark just leapt up and ate a jetliner? What the hell? OK, big drink. Never mind survival.

I may not make it through this abomination. It’s not just the drinking and the bad movie, it’s the commercials every 5 minutes.

I don’t understand. Suddenly the navy is involved in giant shark hunting? Firing a battleship’s cannon at it? And it survives?

It just ate a battleship. I didn’t buy enough hootch for this thing.

A plan! Corral each monster in a bay: Tokyo Bay and San Francisco Bay. Yeah, I can tell this plan will work just great.

Why do the fake scientists in this movie keep peering into microscopes and pouring colored fluids back and forth? They’re studying something the size of a freight train!

Debbie and Asian scientist she just met get lusty over death talk, have sex, and get inspired to use pheromones to draw monsters into bays. Pheromones are made suddenly in lab, and are fluorescent green. Weird.

Asian scientist talks about it’s fate that he and Debbie will be together. Prediction: he’ll be eaten soon.

The octopus just ate a jet fighter. Tally so far:

Octopus: One oil platform, one small jet fighter.

Shark: One jetliner, one battleship.

PZ: One glass of wine.

For some reason, placing the tiny beaker of pheromone bait requires Debbie to drive a submersible to place it in just the right spot. It’s supposed to attract a monster across half the width of the Pacific Ocean!

The submersible claw gets jammed, of course. And here comes the shark. At 500 knots! Don’t worry, the submersible outruns it.

Shark just ate another battleship and the Golden Gate bridge.

The octopus is not getting enough screen time here. If I wanted all sharks all the time, I’d be watching the Discovery Channel.

Octopus was apparently wreaking havoc offscreen. Debbie Gibson’s lover reports that they shot it with artillery and just made it mad.

Since big guns did nothing, they’re obviously going to have to nuke it.

Until Debbie has a brilliant idea: have the two fight each other to the death. Saw that one coming from a mile away.

The only way to get the two monsters to fight is deliver another tiny container of pheromone from a submarine piloted by Debbie. Of course. This is insane.

Debbie is now lustfully hoping for a bloodbath. What happened to the earlier insistence on catching them alive?

Shark has eaten an oil tanker now, and is chasing Debbie Gibson’s sub. At 500 knots, probably. Debbie shoots it with torpedos that miss, until the entire US submarine fleet shows up to shoot at it, too.

And then the octopus shows up to eat 5 submarines! Yay octopus!

Shark and octopus finally meet: octopus is winning with nice strangle hold, until shark bites off one of his arms. Dirty fighter! They separate so SyFy can squeeze in another commercial.

The shark is trying to eat Debbie’s submarine. Just ate it in half, but Debbie is getting away in a submersible.

The octopus just destroyed the submarine containing Debbie’s sensitive Japanese lover. She’s going to rescue him, apparently.

SHARK/OCTOPUS FIGHT!

They wrestle around for a bit, then…both dead? Just like that/ How anticlimactic.

Final tally:

Shark: One jetliner, two battleships, an oil tanker, and the Golden Gate Bridge.

Octopus: An oil platform, one small jet fighter, and six submarines.

PZ: Two glasses of wine.

I think the octopus was robbed. Maybe if his diet had been as robust as the shark’s, he would have won at the end.

Signs of progress

This is one of the best ideas around for promoting better science communication: The Science and Entertainment Exchange forges an alliance between scientists and the popular media. This interview with Jennifer Ouellette shows that she’s doing it just right, since it isn’t one of these things where surly scientists are invited in to criticize, but where entertainers can tap into the imaginations and weird, twisty brains of scientists to get cool ideas that they can use.

Looking for some godless hymns?

Eric Jayne has put together a list of his top 30 atheist songs. It seems like it ought to be longer — to my mind, if it isn’t praising Jesus or any other supernatural entity, it’s an atheist song…which means just about every decent piece of music there is. (That is not to say, of course, that there aren’t any good religious songs — I’ve got a small collection of gospel music on my iPod that’s pretty darned lively).

It’s Loving Day!

It wasn’t that long ago that it was illegal in many states for black people to marry white people — this was the same kind of sentiment promoted by people who are defending marriage from gays nowadays, and I hope it will someday soon look as unbelievable as those old laws. Old laws? They were only overturned on this day in 1967, in the Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia!

Roy Zimmerman (with Laura Love, John McCutcheon, and Sandy O) has a song for this day, of course.

You can see the Lovings in this short news piece.

Aaargh! Obama screws up, very, very badly! I could forgive his religious leanings and vote for him, but denying civil rights to our citizens is not the kind of thing I can overlook. He must be hoping that the Republicans will nominate an extremely distasteful thug in the next election, so we’ll vote for him anyway.

My new career

I am now a cover model for CDs.

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Look for me soon to be gyrating in a rock video, then comes the feature role in soft-core porn, then the drugs and parties, then the stint in rehab, and finally the special documentary on VH1. Oh, heck, I’m going all the way: I’m taking over for Ozzie once he retires.

This is all predicated on the album being a hit, of course. But how can it not? Not only do I grace the cover art, but it has songs like “The Ecstasy of Mallard” and “Going Gay for House”.

Star Trek gets retconned

I finally saw the new Star Trek movie — I really do live way out in the boondocks, you know, and we only have one theater, with a single screen, and we had to wait for the Hannah Montana movie to run its course before we could bring in something interesting. Although, I’m afraid, it ultimately wasn’t that interesting.

There were some good elements to the movie. Star Trek was and is character driven, with these now-familiar personalities bouncing off of each other while resolving some esoteric skiffy crisis. That’s always been the fun part of a Trek movie, and this one preserves that and even turns it up to 11…so while I was in the theater, I was able to sit back with a bag of popcorn and enjoy myself. It’s definitely not a bad movie, and it even taps into fond old memories very effectively.

But here’s the problem: the plot was crap. The plot was mostly irrelevant to the movie, but even there, it was a series of semi-random events strung together by a need to reassemble the Trek cast of characters. The bad guy was just a madman with a great big spaceship and a doomsday weapon out to demolish the Federation of Planets because he thought he’d been wronged, and the starship Enterprise ping-pongs about chasing him down, picking up members of the cast, getting fresh Star Fleet Academy graduate James T. Kirk promoted, etc., etc., etc. Beating the evil villain seemed secondary to showing how Kirk met Spock, how Scotty got his job as engineer, and how uncannily Karl Urban channels the ghost of DeForest Kelley.

And then the real purpose of the movie emerged: it’s a retcon, a retroactive continuity adjustment, in which time travel is used to create an alternative history timeline for the characters. It’s plainly an attempt to restart the franchise, and this movie felt like a preliminary scene-setting effort, where the story didn’t so much matter and the important thing was to reconcile the fan base to new actors and variations from Trek canon.

That would be fine, except…this show has been going on for 43 years. I watched it avidly in its very first incarnation, and fondly remember pleading with my parents to stay up late on a school night so I could watch it. But there is a time to move on. I found myself wondering why actors would want to risk the fate of settling into comfortable archetypes — the original actors were pretty much type-cast after the show, and they at least had the advantage of being the people who forged those personalities. I thought about another series of movies with Kirk and Spock and Bones and Scotty and all those others, and many more plots with planet-destroying space villains, and yet more resolutions via deus ex Jefferies tube, deus ex particle polarity reversal, deus ex warp in the space-time continuum, and I just felt tired. Very tired. What I like in my science fiction is the new, not the familiar, and I don’t think this franchise is going to deliver what I desire.

I shall fan the flames and point out a couple of other things that bugged me.

  • Miniskirts. Uhura was one good flounce away from a major wardrobe malfunction. If it’s a matter of weird future fashion, they should go all the way and put the guys in g-strings and tube tops.

  • Did anyone notice the interior design of the Romulan ship? Funky weird platforms with no guardrails suspended over a huge empty space. Only the Mario Brothers could like that layout.

  • Somehow, all the familiar characters of the old show get themselves instantly put in charge of the bridge of the flagship of the Federation fleet. This does not compute.

  • People seemed to like the action sequences in space. I didn’t. In particular, there’s one scene where the Enterprise comes out of warp into a field of wreckage, all closely packed, and Sulu maneuvers his way through it all, bumping into a few bits here and there. That only makes sense if the velocity of a starship is like something under 20 miles an hour. (By the way, Firefly also did this. Hated it there, too.)